Quotes About Creativity

Fiction and poetry] are medicines, they're doses, and they heal the rupture that reality makes on the imagination.

I wrote my way out.

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

My mother had painted the white roses red and now she claimed they grew that way.

Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and forever. There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our death bearable. Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time.

Examine this statement: 'A woman cannot be a poet.' Dr Samuel Johnson (Englishman 1709-84 Occupation: Language Fixer and Big Mouth.) What then shall I give up? My poetry or my womanhood?

Every word written is a net to catch the word that has escaped.

What art does is coax us away from the mechanical and towards the miraculous

Words kept salted when they cannot be found fresh. Words kept fresh when they cannot be found clean. The words go deeper, far out of reach of vessels, blood vessels bursting, that thick humming in the head. To find the words, just out of reach, beyond my hand, the coral of it, the pearl of it, fish.

Most kids grow up leaving something out for Santa at Christmas time when he comes down the chimney. I used to make presents for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

I tried to build an igloo out of orange peel but it kept falling down and even when it stood up I didn't have an eskimo to put in it, so I had to invent a story about 'How Eskimo Got Eaten', which made me even more miserable. It's always the same with diversions; you get involved

I need the dark places to get outside of common sense

I always say to people who want to write: Live life! Don't stand on the rim, don't sit on the sidelines. Make mistakes, make a mess, get it wrong. Read everything, and get out and be in life.

I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write.

There are two kinds of writing; the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don't want to go. You look where you don't want to look.

Reading's not a luxury, art's not a luxury. It's about your soul, and it's about yourself. And if reading is a luxury, being human is a luxury

It's a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books—not part of me, all of me—and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So the more I can be, the better the books will be.

When you are a solitary kid you find an imaginary friend.

Reading is where the wild things are.

If there was an elephant in the supermarket, she'd either not see it at all, or call it Mrs Jones and talk about fishcakes.

What they held was already inside me, and together we could get away. And standing over the smoldering pile of paper and type, still warm the next cold morning, I understood that there was something else I could do. Fuck it, I thought, I can write my own.

Dinginess is death to a writer. Filth, discomfort, hunger, cold, trauma and drama, don't matter a bit.

Creativity is on the side of health – it isn't the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.

I think every work of art is an act of faith, or we wouldn't bother to do it. It is a message in a bottle, a shout in the dark. It's saying, 'I'm here and I believe that you are somewhere and that you will answer if necessary across time, not necessarily in my lifetime.